Roleplaying Game

Entries tagged with daniel

He’d done a deed that would net him social capital. Rhiannon, Jazz, and even Melody could be enemies under the right circumstances, but they weren’t, at least for tonight. And that was okay. He jumped over the outstretched legs of a pair of drunks and hummed an Aerosmith song. Daniel wondered for the millionth time why he was on better terms with the white hats than his own kind, and in this well-worn train of thought he stumbled over a realization about himself that made him stop where he stood, teetering over the edge of a street curb.

Being liked was more important to him than anything else.

His brow furrowed.

Could that be it? The answer to why he hadn’t become a violence-crazed monster had nothing to do with his demon at all, but was instead a desire for popularity? And when his sire hadn’t provided it, he had cashed in his chips and sided with the good guys?

Daniel retraced his steps and turned into a narrow street used primarily for loading and unloading into restaurants and shops. He needed a minute alone with his thoughts. As he walked faster, he squeezed the back of his neck and mulled it over. If this new thing was true, that meant he’d rip out throats if he was surrounded by a nest of vampires, which wasn’t a bad thought except that meant he was a fucking sheep.

And here he’d come to think of himself as a trailblazer.

“No way.”

He was too deep in his self-effacing thoughts to notice the demon until he was on top of it. It was hairy and muscular. Its teeth gnashed as it chewed on the still-warm corpse of a stock boy. As it turned to assess the interruption, its eyes glowed red. A hell-hound. Daniel had heard of them, but never seen one in the flesh, probably because this particular breed had come through the portal sometime before it was guarded. The hound growled and dropped its meal.

The car trip to the alley Cian had told them about was a little longer than usual, a roadblock having been set up and the closed-off street full of vehicles with flashing lights and police. Melody strained to see what the commotion was and it looked like there were screens raised in the middle of the pavement outside a bar or club or something. As she settled back into her seat she saw Jazz sniffing at the open window of the car, the witch's face crinkled in concentration.

Her eyes narrowed and her foot pressed a little harder on the accelerator once they were clear of the traffic around the scene. "That must be the market he was talking about," Mel said, pointing at the E-Zmart's lights, "and there's the alley." She was almost out of the vehicle by the time Jazz parked, the older witch puzzled by the young woman's keenness to get to the alley.

Mel had the backpack on her shoulder as she stepped off the kerb and looked down into the dark alley, eyes taking a moment to adjust after the lights of the market.

"Daniel? Are you here?" she called out, one hand on the corner of the wall, head tilted to one side as she took a step past the phone box.

His vampire senses were keenly attuned to the difference in the air; that was the word he ascribed to the electric charge and chemical scent of a narrow passage that should smell like piss and garbage. After getting a note at Ragnarok, he felt obliged to show up and at least see what all the fuss was. Daniel understood that some kind of magical door to hell had opened and demons were sporadically coming through. People were needed to stand guard. And do what, Daniel didn’t really know; intervene? Take notes? Roll out a welcome mat?

There was a girl leaning against the wall, arms crossed, legs long and straight.

He pulled on his earlobe and cleared his throat. “I’m Daniel,” he said. “I got a message.” He watched her push away from the concrete block wall and approach him. An unknown chill went down his back and then he saw the stake in her hand and figured out why. He raised his palms. “Whoa… I didn’t come here for that.”

“Relax,” she said. She stowed the weapon in a band around her leg. “I’m Rhiannon. Normally you and I wouldn’t be so friendly, but right now we’ve got bigger concerns.” She straightened up. “For all we know, the creatures that came through that door rip off vampire faces, too, and something tells me you like yours.”

Daniel scowled.

Rhiannon tipped her head. “Am I wrong?”

“No,” he said, on the defense because it sounded like an insult, except that nobody in his right mind would want his face torn off Texas Chainsaw Massacre style. “No argument here.”

“Good.” Rhiannon fiddled with a blocky gadget with a rubber antenna. “Besides, I know your friend Holly. She asked me specifically not to stake you.” She turned a knob and the speaker crackled.

“Oh. Oh!” He brightened and stood up straighter. “Well, um… what do you need? I’m not all that combative.”

“You’re good enough. Here.” She handed him a heavy walky-talky and a pack of extra batteries. “Radio if you see anything weird and one of us will answer. Then pass it to the next person when you’re through. Someone will be here before sunrise. Did you bring a weapon?”

Daniel brandished a tire iron he pulled from his car trunk and a butcher knife from his kitchen.

Rhiannon’s mouth puckered with some kind of humor the vampire didn’t get. “Okay.” She shook her head. “Don’t worry. Probably nothing will happen. I staked a vampire who came sniffing, but that’s it. The portal’s been quiet.”

“Comforting.” Daniel craned his neck and looked at the gap in the wall, the painted line around the border.

“Yeah. Well.” Rhiannon patted her pockets to make sure she had keys. “I think that’s it. So… thanks for showing up.” It felt too weird to thank a vampire, so she cut around him and headed toward the parking lot. “Later, Daniel.”

“Later.” He watched her go, then he settled into the spot Rhiannon had vacated and wished he’d thought to bring a book.

Daniel’s knuckles tapped on the apartment door. With his hands in his pockets, he waited. He began to casually study the paint on the door frame, all the while hoping he didn’t look misshapen through the peep hole. Wait… what if he hadn’t knocked loud enough? Should he knock again? But if the first time had been loud enough, wouldn’t that seem obnoxiously impatient? Like the physical equivalent of shouting, ‘I know you’re in there, now open the door!’

He opted to shuffle uncomfortably and scratch his stubble.

He hadn’t tried Holly’s apartment in ages. It was the most obvious place to look for her, but he didn’t want to be pushy. He just wanted to make sure she was alright. If she was, great! They could hang out or he could hop the stairs and walk back into the night, assured that she had a pulse. The afterlife was good.

“Solomon’s Scrolls.” Daniel scratched the stubble on his jaw. “Huh.” It was his first time going to the magic shop – any magic shop – so he didn’t know what to expect, but a Biblical reference for a name wasn’t high on the list. At the door he hesitated before he touched the knob. What if there was a spell on it? Would it burn like a cross? He had touched one of those once, just for shits and grins. Man, it hurt.

He licked his finger and slapped the door knob twice, until he was satisfied it wouldn’t fry him. Then he entered and sniffed the air, which smelled of herbs and candle wax. He spotted Melody up front and cruised right up to her. “Wasn’t Solomon the guy who taught his son to use astrology for sexual gratification?”

He hopped on a table. Two candles toppled and rolled across the velvety tablecloth.

At 5 a.m., Daniel collapsed on his couch, his weight sending throw pillows flying as he cracked the library book and started to read. Socrates, his new furry roommate, crouched in the open cage with its water and food supply. His nose twitched.

“Important things to know before you adopt,” the vampire read aloud. “That ship has sailed.” He turned a page and began again. “The weight of a domestic rabbit can range from two pounds to over twenty, depending upon breed. Rabbits also display natural habits like chewing and digging, which can frustrate new owners. Huh.”

Tossing the book aside, Daniel sat up. He stared at the animal, his palms rubbing the lower half of his face, his hair standing on end. This was an acute case of buyer’s remorse. He couldn’t remember why he brought this thing home in the first place. He was hungry, the butcher was out of blood, but then that cute Asian girl went all googly-eyed over the rabbit and suddenly Daniel was shelling out cash to bring it home.

If Socrates was the reason he didn’t get his security deposit back, he was going to make all four of its feet into key chains.

Normal people adopted dogs. Cats. A tank full of fish. But this, this was the anti-dude pet, and he’d been unreasonably persuaded by that girl’s cooing noises. Maybe he’d read all the signs wrong and it wasn’t that he was hungry at all.

“I need to get laid,” Daniel muttered. He nodded.

He got up and shelled out of his t-shirt. “Damn youuuu, Holly Pirnerrrrrr,” he sang to the empty apartment, his voice a pleasant tenor as he turned the faucet knobs.

She'd been meaning to get to Ragnarok anyway. Gerald had mentioned it to her ages ago, but between one thing and another there'd been no time. With spring approaching, classes had hit a bit of a lull, and she was prepared for the next week. That cleared some of her schedule.

Julianna had parked her car in the lot and was now waiting in the queue to get inside. Some of the 'costumed' staff were outside greeting guests, and the Watcher was amusing herself by trying to deduce who was actually human and who wasn't. It was the perfect place to be if you wanted to hide in plain sight. She wondered if the owner had to strike a deal with any vampires who might be employed here.

Inside, it was surprisingly ordinary, at least as far as decor went. Julianna ordered a gimlet at the bar, then sipped at it while she wondered at the possibility of getting an audience with the proprietor. Her colleague wouldn't have mentioned the woman if she might not be a valuable acquaintance to have, so perhaps she should make an effort herself.

In the meantime, she would enjoy the atmosphere here. Las Vegas might not be much for culture, per se, but it didn't lack for its own brand of ambiance.

Of course Daniel figured that was his fault, too. Get too loose with your relationship rules and suddenly there weren’t any at all. If their involvement could be construed as a relationship… He was fuzzy on that. Nevertheless, Daniel had given it up for Holly, and now there was no Holly, but he was still trying to hold out because there might (?) be a Holly at some point in the future and at this point, he was proud of his restraint. Not killing people might be the only prowess Daniel could muster.

But things got touchy when the butcher ran out of blood.

So here Daniel was in a pet shop, holding a brown bunny by its midsection, pretending to be in earnest search of a furry companion. The bunny’s eyes darted back and forth. Its nose twitched. Daniel inspected its undercarriage because he didn’t know its gender. Why that mattered when the idea was to eat it, he didn’t know.

“Have you ever cared for a bunny before?” asked a saleswoman in enormous glasses.

“No,” he said. “I had a dog once.”

“They’re nothing… like dogs,” she condescended.

“Really? Because my dog humped everything in sight, too.” Daniel smiled at her, trying to charm her. It did not work, so he said, “I’ll check out a library book,” just to get her off his scent. He carried the bunny to the shop window and looked outside. Daylight savings time meant that he had to shack up longer, so it was 9:30 already. The shop closed at 10:00. If he was going to drain this critter tonight, he needed to make up his mind.

A pretentious woman in a fur stole walked past the shop. Daniel covered the bunny’s eyes. "Look awaaaaay," he cried.

The Desert Queen, the city’s newest boutique hotel, went from concept drawings to physical structure in record time. Local magazines hailed it as an architectural marvel. A newspaper columnist referred to it as a tourist’s wet dream. Behind closed doors, it was called worse things: a rush job, a fool’s errand, the hotel that dirty money built. People suspected that contractors cut corners to meet the deadlines of anxious city developers, and more disturbing, that building inspectors were bribed to pass it with flying colors.

The hotel was a modern work of pink-tinted glass and polished steel. Though only seven stories tall, its towers rose at sharp, impossible angles meant to mimic the shape of a royal crown. Hotel rooms pitched diagonally over a landscape of bubbling fountains, rippling pools, and greenery so vibrant that gardeners joked it had been painted. Even the marble tiles around the toilets were imported from Italy.

It opened with a flourish at the end of summer and was booked solid through Easter. All were poised to breathe a collective sigh of relief until the first sign of trouble: a crack in the foundation, first reported by a maintenance worker on New Year’s Eve. Then a second crack… this one in a load-bearing column in the lobby.

When the first spire buckled, the steel yawned loudly, sounding like the bellow of an exotic beast. Chunks of plaster plopped into the water. Jagged cracks appeared in the windows. Then flooring began to spill out, and bits of wire and pipe. A squadron of fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances wailed and honked as they approached on Las Vegas Boulevard. A lone news helicopter circled overhead in the night sky.

Then a second spire snapped like an insect wing. A mixture of building materials, furniture, and people teetered precariously over the stone plaza. Guests shouted and pointed. Some took pictures. Within moments, all hell broke loose.

It was a slow night in McKenna's and Mike had let the bartender and most of the waitstaff go early. There was no point in keeping them standing around when there wasn't any demand for them and they wouldn't make any tip money. He knew the business as well as anyone and he hadn't scheduled himself to work the Dive that night, so he put himself behind the bar instead.

Not that there was much to do there either, there were only three customers in the bar area and he had one waitress left to cover the tables. The prep work was all done and at this point unless there was a sudden flood of people all they'd need to do is put things away for the night. He looked up from his newspaper as the bell over the door rang, jostled by said door's movement as someone stepped in from the street.

The festivities on the Las Vegas strip were your basic police nightmare. A mile-long stretch of the boulevard was blocked off to traffic so that revelers could stagger drunkenly down the middle of the street. Food trucks and street vendors sold pizza, cheese steaks, popcorn, cotton candy, and plastic cups full of beer. Some sold pre-mixed margaritas and daiquiris. At each major intersection, a stage showcased performers and music pumped from speakers mounted on the light posts.

It didn't seem to matter that it was December in the desert. There was plenty of body heat to go around.

At midnight, several large screens would broadcast a countdown before fireworks lit the sky.

The grand ballroom of the Skylark Hotel was awash in shades of forest green and gold. The charity ball had been arranged to benefit a local children's hospital, and so a large percentage of the proceeds from the door tickets and bar would be donated to renovate the facility. A two-story Christmas tree towered over the buffet tables of festive finger foods and chocolate fountain, and people had placed unwrapped toys under the limbs to be delivered to the hospital the next day. Champagne flowed freely. There were two stages for the live jazz musicians that would play all night. Santa's scantily clad elves wandered about the room with trays of shrimp and caviar. A dance floor took up the center of the space underneath a gleaming chandelier and there were beautifully decorated round tables on the edges of the room.

The ticket price was manageable, and a few tickets had gone out free for radio promotions and the like.

Luckily for the undead, the decor did not include wall-to-wall mirrors, though there were a few on the high ceiling.

In various corners, Vegas performance artists entertained to ooohs and aaahs. For instance, there was a man eating a gleaming sword in the corner.

While Halloween was a favorite time of year for her, the same could not be said of Christmas, which just reminded her of when she was still human and living with her parents. There was a reason she had started to run away. And the holiday music just made it worse.

Things at the Dive had been going all right. The New Year's Eve show was being put together, and she'd discreetly made sure that The Frayed Nerves would be playing later in the set this year. There had been some griping, but she'd smoothed it over before Mike could get wind of it.

Not that she had returned Maddy's phone call. She'd listened to the message repeatedly, but never called the other brunette back. Now that it had been so long, trying to make contact again would probably make her look weird. But when she was weird, maybe that wasn't so bad.

She knew the reasons she was blocked about it, which was why she was knocking on Daniel's door tonight. She'd deliberately been walking a wide circle around his neighborhood on the off chance that she might run into Holly, but she'd done some recon earlier and found the mortal not around. Maybe they were on the outs too?

“Hey, Hols, it’s Daniel. I haven’t heard from you in a while so I thought I’d check in and uh… make sure you haven’t skipped town. So, no beautiful English girls have turned up in the hospital with amnesia. I checked. Annnnd you’re still getting mail at your place, so I know you haven’t moved and had it forwarded. Yeah, I checked that, too. Creepy, I know. Sorry about the broken latch, I thought I could pick a mailbox lock without destroying it. I was wrong. Breaking into your mailbox was the coward’s way out. I was worried about sounding too desperate on your machine but I seem to have arrived there anyway, which means it was all for nothing. Gimme a call and let me know you’ve still got a pulse, alright? Iiii… I miss you. Doesn't have to be anything serious, just... Yeah. Bye.”

The night was clear and cold. A weather front had blown through the day prior and dropped the evening temps into the thirties. A pale sliver of last-quarter moon hung over the desert, its edges sharp, and only a few wisps of clouds obscured the stars. Into this stark landscape a meteor streaked just before midnight.

It landed on the outskirts of town at the end of a dirt path. The land was part of an old horse ranch, abandoned in the early 1970s, so no family emerged from the cabin to investigate the fiery hole in their property, and no animals paced nervously along the fences.

With a red ink pen, Daniel circled a want ad for security at a local hot spot. He did so begrudgingly because the last thing he wanted was to be that dick who turned people away at the door, but his checking account sat at $362.87. He was getting desperate. The newspaper rattled as he turned the page and skimmed the back side for other opportunities.

Hostess. Electrician. Craps dealer. Plumber.

He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand and refocused on the small print. Where qualifications didn’t take him out of contention, pesky details like daytime operating hours did the trick. Maybe he was barking up the wrong tree. Maybe he ought to hit the streets and look in establishments that served demons. Or maybe he should start robbing people blind like Deanna had suggested.

Man, how long had it been since he saw Deanna? Two months or more? Was she still around? Daniel wondered if he’d know if she dusted, or just wander around clueless for the next hundred years.

He sipped black coffee and took stock of his surroundings.

Hash Brown’s was a locals spot known as much for its colorful wait staff of off-duty drag queens as its specialty dish of fried potatoes. It was cheap fare and the atmosphere was relaxed, if you discounted the occasional bursts of raucous laughter from the kitchen and dramatic arguments between the line cooks and management. Daniel liked it enough that he never fed off a customer.

“You need anything else, sweetie?” The waiter tucked a pencil behind his earlobe. He splashed more coffee into the vampire’s emptying mug.

Daniel rubbed his palms together. If he didn’t order something substantial soon, he’d get bumped out of his booth. “Ah, yeah, actually. Can I get a hamburger scramble, rare as you can legally serve it?”

“You got it, baby.” A smirk and a sashay.

“Yep. That guy knows I’m a vampire,” Daniel said. He looked out the window as an ambulance shrieked by.

The hospital was quiet. It didn't take long for Holly to realize that here, without a clock or a watch, she would have no idea what time it was. Everything looked the same. She watched blankly as nurses and other personnel passed her by. She was perched on a hard plastic seat in the small waiting area.

The brunette had tried to purchase a snack from the vending machine, but her dollar had gotten stuck. She couldn't find it in her to care. She turned her head to look at it now, the bill sticking halfway out of the slot.

Holly had washed her hands, but there was still blood on her shirt. She hadn't noticed it. It wasn't so out of place there, anyway. At least she fit in.

Daniel sat on a picnic table and watched people meander on and off the fenced patio. The band was loud enough to enjoy outside. A cloud of smoke rose above the heads of people looking for space to swing their arms, or just a break from unwarranted body contact. He rubbed his hands together and considered where he was going to get his next meal. It was possible that some drunk or drugged concert goer would let him feed after the show, and he knew he could wait a couple of hours, if he needed to. In the meantime, he wasn’t going anywhere near the peanuts.

The sharp end of a dart whizzed through the air until it sunk solidly into cork. The quill vibrated in place. "Bullseye!" proclaimed its drunken thrower as he threw his hands in the air. Victory was his, assuming that darts were meant to hit a 'For Sale or Rent' board posted two feet from the game board. Daniel lumbered over and pulled the point from an ad for a 1976 Chevrolet with 40,000 miles on the odometer.

Hey... not a bad looking car.

Blindly, he moved to stab it into the correct spot. The air alongside his ear whistled. Thud. There was stinging pain in his right hand. "Ah! Son of a bitch!" He pulled the dart from the soft flesh between his knuckles. "You meant ta do that!" he accused an unknown assailant.

Daniel stood with his back to a counter and his fingers in a bowl of peanuts. He popped a few in his mouth and crunched them to smithereens.

The Cactus was an ordinary bar. Sports on the television, dart board in the back, cheap beer running from the tap. Nothing to write home about, but comfortable. Casually dressed men and women huddled around tables playing cards and telling jokes, or they nursed solitary beers at the long, polished bar. Daniel just wanted some dinner.

It was halfway to dumb, going for a neck at the Cactus. There weren’t any tourists in sight. But he was facing a major hurdle and the last thing he needed was to sweat over it in a high-class joint with mirrored walls and closed circuit televisions mounted in every corner.

Tonight was night one of operation Catch and Release. He just needed a victim.